Building the Administrative State

• Date: 01 July 2004
• Published date: 01 July 2004
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2004.00396.x

502 Public Administration Review •July/August 2004, Vol. 64, No. 4

Building the Administrative State

Anthony Bertelli, University of Georgia

Daniel P. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations,

Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928, (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 504 pp., $70.00 hard, ISBN: 0-0691-

07009-1; $26.95 paper, ISBN: 0-0691-07010-5.

David E. Lewis, Presidents and the Politics of Agency: Design Political In-

sulation in the United States Government Bureaucracy, 1946–1997, (Stanf-

ord, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 240 pp., $45.00 hard, ISBN:

0804745889.

An increasingly consistent narra-

tive of the emergence of the Ameri-

can administrative state is being told

in the academy. Beginning with a his-

torical-cultural view, it suggests that

the administrative state is inextrica-

bly intertwined with the nationaliz-

ing and urbanizing forces of the in-

dustrial revolution. Late nineteenth-

century Americans discovered that

the values of an agrarian, community-

centered society were crumbling in

the wake of these challenges, leaving

them vulnerable, “a society without

a core” (Wiebe 1980, 12). The na-

tion’s transition to the twentieth cen-

tury was a continuing search for a new

core around which American society

could reconstitute itself. That new

center would provide stability and

continuity. The nascent federal bu-

reaucracy simply helped to do this.

It was a pragmatic response to a

vacuum in the capacity of the Ameri-

can state to implement public policies

on a national scale. As the nation and

world invaded the small, community-

centered towns, and American cities

burgeoned in size, Americans became

aware of massive inadequacies in the

existing political system in meeting

the new challenges posed by eco-

Anthony M. Bertelli is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia. His

current research considers the role of political ideology in crafting institutions of administrative governance. E-mail: bertelli@uga.edu.

nomic change and the social, cultural,

and ideological dislocations that it

produced.

In the 1880’s, the American presi-

dent was principally a moral figure-

head, an example to the nation of in-

dustriousness and Protestant values.

Congress wrangled over the distribu-

tion of political power. Wiebe (1980)

has argued that during this period,

Americans increasingly turned to the

national government to control the

economic and social upheavals cre-

ated by unparalleled corporate expan-

sion and the floods of immigration.

The emphasis on hierarchical organi-

zation to control these problems cre-

ated the need for a strong chief ex-

ecutive to coordinate this hierarchy,

much as the captains of industry di-

rected the flow of power in the corpo-

rate structure. McKinley, Roosevelt,

and Wilson grasped the importance of

co-opting this successful technique,

creating power structures that “to a

large extent” redirected the control of

the federal government away from

Congress and into the Oval Office.

This redistribution of power would not

change markedly until the presidency

of Warren Harding, but its effects were

permanent.

Other scholars have centered their

attention on the New Deal’s “Policy

State” (Amenta 2000; Brinkley 1996;

Patterson 2000). As a pragmatic re-

sponse to the depression, FDR’s ad-

ministration launched what we know

now as the federal bureaucracy. It was

a break in the “path dependence”

(North 1991) of the early state. In an

influential work, Theda Skocpol

(1995) stressed the correlated growth

in formal powers and the governance

capacity of bureaus as a general mat-

ter. As the state received more formal

powers and influence from interest

groups became greater in specific

policy areas, the state developed more

capacity for policy making. Real so-

cial problems provoked a functional-

ist response, which was the adminis-

trative state.

Contrary to the Tocquevillian no-

tion that there was no American “state”

at all, Stephen Skowronek (1982) has

argued that the early part of the repub-

lic was a “state of courts and parties,”

in which parties set policy agendas and

regulation was the outcome of specific

court decisions. Universities, lawyers,

and businessmen reacted against the

spoils system (and, ipso facto, party

dominance) because they wanted an